Unicode encoding philosophy

[Rebecca Bettencourt]

The alignment of quotation marks in a CJK square is an issue affecting very
few characters, with no easy mechanism in markup or rich text formatting,
with precedent in the form of SVSes for other punctuation marks used in CJK
text.

Italics applies to a large, open-ended set of characters (possibly the
entire Unicode character set), has been implemented in just about every
form of markup and formatting ever conceived, and has no precedent of
implementation using VSes (other than the use of VS15/VS16 for text vs
emoji presentation, which even the UTC has determined was a mistake).

-- Rebecca Bettencourt


On Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 10:58 AM William_J_G Overington via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> I have been reading the following.
>
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23212-quotes-svs-proposal.pdf
>
> I am not an expert on this at all. It looks good and I hope it becomes
> implemented.
>
> What puzzles me though, is that structurally the proposal seems to have
> much the same encoding philosophy as a suggestion proposed by me in that
> they both would allow a variation selector to be used so as to conserve
> in plain text information that is typically these days conserved in rich
> text and gets lost if plain text is used. In my proposal, using a
> variation selector to conserve in a plain text document information
> about the use of italics in some text.
>
> My proposal was rejected, quite strongly.
>
> So, deep down, what please is the Unicode encoding philosophy that
> allows variation selectors to be used to conserve some information, yet
> not other information, in plain text?
>
> William Overington
>
> Wednesday 4 October 2023
>
>
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